I Shall Return — Claude McKay
I Shall Return — Story and Context
“I Shall Return” is a sonnet spoken by an exile who vows to come home. The speaker imagines the sights and sounds of his homeland in vivid detail, promising himself “I shall return again” to everything he has lost. The poem never says exactly where home is, but the natural imagery — forest fires, mountain streams, village dances — strongly suggests the Caribbean landscape McKay grew up in.
Claude McKay left Jamaica as a young man and spent most of his adult life in the United States, where he became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Much of his poetry explores the tension between his adopted home and the Caribbean island he left behind. “I Shall Return” reads as both a personal promise and a wider statement about the pain of exile.
McKay wrote from the position of an exile living far from Jamaica. The poem’s future tense — “I shall return” — is a promise rather than a memory, which separates this poem from anthology poems that look backward. McKay is imagining a homecoming that has not yet happened.
Form and Structure
The poem is a 14-line English (Shakespearean) sonnet, though McKay uses it to express longing for a Caribbean homeland rather than romantic love, the form’s traditional subject. Three quatrains build separate memories — sight, then movement, then sound — before the final couplet repeats the opening promise: “I shall return, I shall return again,” This use of anaphora at both the start and the end frames the whole poem as an act of self-persuasion.
The regular rhyme scheme and steady iambic pentameter give the poem a controlled, determined rhythm, as though the speaker is holding his emotions in check. Traditionally the sonnet form contains a volta, a turn in argument; here there is no dramatic turn — instead the poem builds steadily towards its closing promise, suggesting quiet resolve rather than sudden realisation.
Each quatrain focuses on a different sense: sight (“wonder-eyes”, “blue-black smoke”), motion (“waters rushing down the mountain passes”), and sound (“fiddle and fife”). This sensory build-up makes the homeland feel physically real despite the speaker’s distance from it.
Themes and Imagery
The central theme is homesickness turned into hope. Instead of dwelling only on sadness, the speaker fills the poem with joyful images: he will “laugh and love”, watch “forest fires burn” at “golden noon”, and loiter beside streams that bathe “the bending grasses”. Nature imagery dominates the poem, standing in for everything the speaker associates with belonging.
McKay structures his memories through the senses: sight (“wonder-eyes”, “sapphire skies”), touch and motion (“waters rushing down the mountain passes”), and sound (“fiddle and fife”, “dear delicious tunes”). This sensory layering makes the imagined homecoming feel real and immediate rather than distant.
The poem also acknowledges pain directly. The music of “village dances” is described as stirring “the hidden depths of native life”, while memory itself is called “dim remembered runes” — suggesting that time has blurred these memories without erasing them. The final line makes the emotional stakes explicit: the return will “ease my mind of long, long years of pain”. The repetition of “long” stretches the line, mimicking the drawn-out suffering of exile that the rest of the poem has been quietly working against.
Comparing I Shall Return Across the Anthology
Drummer Hodge (Hardy): Both poems concern a speaker’s relationship with a distant land, but the outcomes are opposite. McKay promises an eventual homecoming; Hardy’s Hodge is buried under “strange-eyed constellations” with no return possible. Compare hope against finality.
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (Wordsworth): Both poems use vivid nature imagery stored in memory to bring comfort. Wordsworth’s daffodils “flash upon that inward eye” from the past; McKay’s images are imagined in the future tense. Compare how memory works differently in each poem.
Sonnet 29 (Barrett Browning): Both poems use the sonnet form to channel intense longing through nature imagery — Browning’s wild vines around a tree, McKay’s streams and mountain passes. Compare how each poet adapts a traditional love-poem form for a different kind of devotion.
For the comparison question, remember that “I Shall Return” is unusual in the anthology because it looks forward, not backward. Most memory-based poems (Wordsworth, Heaney) reflect on the past; McKay’s speaker is making a promise about the future, which changes the poem’s tone from nostalgic to determined.
Whichever poem you pair this with, focus your comparison on method: how does each poet use form, sensory imagery, and repetition to shape the reader’s sense of longing? Precise, short quotations will support a stronger response than general description.